A scorpion, the ringed wonder and a teapot

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This past week, we had another great show in the stars as a fat waxing gibbous moon passed by Saturn in the early evening low southern sky. Since then, the moon has migrated farther to the east of Saturn against the background of the stars, and it’s now a full moon rising at sunset and setting at sunrise.

The moon’s never-ending sojourn eastward from night to night among the starry dome, along with its monthly fattening and thinning, are both courtesy of its 27.3 day orbit around the Earth. The changing angle between the Earth, the moon and the sun is responsible for the changing phases of the moon as we watch it from our backyards.

As this week progresses, the moon will once again go gibbous, taking on a football shape as it rises later and later after sunset. Even though it won’t be quite as full, our lunar neighbor will continue to whitewash the sky, making it really tough this week to enjoy the Perseids, the best meteor shower of the year.

You might see a few “shooting stars” or tiny pieces of comet debris plowing through and perishing about 60 to 80 miles high in our atmosphere. They’re especially visible from around midnight to just before morning twilight kicks in. The peak of the Perseids is this Saturday night-Sunday morning, and if it weren’t for the intruding moonlight you’d be able to watch possibly more than 50 meteors an hour in the dark countryside. As they say, wait until next year, when the Perseids will put on a much better show with moonless heavens during the peak!

Getting back to Saturn, it’s the bright star-like object in the early evening, low southern sky. It’s just about always a great telescope target with its 130,000-plus diameter ring system. In fact, most of the light that we see when you glance at Saturn with the naked eye is sunlight bouncing off the billions and billions of ice-covered pebbles, rocks and boulders that make up Saturn’s ring system. Unfortunately, Saturn is taking a very low nightly track across the sky this summer. That means Earth’s thicker level of atmosphere near the horizon is going to muddy up our view of the great planet, especially if there’s a lot of turbulence. If Saturn is really blurry, try viewing it on another evening.

The second brightest star-like object nearest Saturn actually is a star. Antares is the brightest star in Scorpius. Even to the naked eye, Antares has a ruddy hue to it. It’s what astronomers call a super red giant star that’s so big, if it replaced our sun in the center of the solar system all of the planets out to about Jupiter would be entombed and obliterated inside Antares! It doesn’t look all that gargantuan in our night sky because Antares is about 600 light years away, or a little more than 3,400 trillion miles away.

Scorpius is a constellation that actually looks like what it’s supposed to be — a giant scorpion. To the upper right of Antares, there are three distinct stars that make up the head of the scorpion. To the lower left of Antares is the long hooked, stinger tail. Unfortunately, the tail can be difficult to see in the northern half of the U.S. because Scorpius never rises that high in the sky, and its tail drags low in the southern horizon most of the night.

For extra credit, just to the left of Scorpius is the constellation Sagittarius. It’s supposed to be a half-man, half-horse shooting an arrow. Good luck seeing that! What you see without too much trouble is a giant celestial teapot!

Solar eclipse countdown

Two weeks from Monday, on Aug. 21, there will be a truly tremendous celestial event in the United States. We’ll have a total solar eclipse from coast to coast across the contiguous 48 states from Oregon to Nebraska to Missouri, and all the way down to the coast of South Carolina. In Pottsville, we’ll have a deep partial eclipse with 75 percent of the sun covered by the moon at 2:41 p.m.

If at all possible, you should travel to see it, at least that’s my advice. One of the most overused adjectives in the English language lately is “awesome,” but total solar eclipses are truly that and then some! If possible watch the weather and be flexible with where in the band you choose to view it. A great cloud cover forecaster is clearskyclock.com. A great app and website to give you information for any location for the total and partial eclipse across the entire 48 states is eclipse2017.org.

Again, and I can’t say this enough, you must have eye protection like special eclipse glasses to watch any part of an eclipse. Protect your eyes! There are still many places you can purchase eclipse glasses online, but you have to order them now. There are some retail stores that are selling eclipse glasses, but I know they’re selling out fast.

(Lynch, an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist, can be reached at mikewlynch@comcast.net)

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